What does God Look Like?

What does God look like? What do angels and demons look like?

Since these questions deal with spiritual beings, I lumped them together.

First, God is a spirit. This is different from a ghost and so isn't really what you probably think of when you think of a 'spirit'. Most people probably imagine something like an invisible, incorporeal (non-physical) being, but one that is otherwise fairly similar to something in the known world. Like a translucent human. That's not a very accurate image of God though, so I kind of don't like it, but it may be as close as we can get to having a metal picture of God. We tend to think in visual images and it is difficult to think outside those boxes. God is not defined by a physical body or anything else that our human eyes can see. He doesn't have five fingers and toes - He doesn't have a physical body. Everything physical was made by Him, but He's beyond that. So 'what does He look like' is not exactly easy to answer.

 There were some people who encountered God in the Bible and from their description, it might be like looking at lightning. Or like being on the surface of the sun where the very air is so filled with light and heat that you'd be burned to a crisp just by being close. Because of this, when God and people interact in the Bible, it is almost always with God taking on the form of something else. Like He spoke to Moses from fire and talked to Abraham through dreams. The people who found themselves in God's 'physical' presence were often there 'in the spirit' (so not in their physical body, somehow) and usually acted as if they were pretty sure they were about to die. The descriptions of such encounters vary, but there is usually a whole lot of blinding light.

Angels and demons are likewise not confined to a physical form like we are. They can almost be thought of as shape-shifters. The Bible says that sometimes people encounter angels and think they are regular people. And it says that demons 'disguise themselves as angels of light' (so, in the unlikely event that you ever saw an angel, be very, very doubtful that it is an angel and not a demon before you trust it!) The Bible several times admonishes the people not to trust 'spirits' and to test anything that claims to be from God (which is done by evaluating its words and actions very, very carefully). Anyway, we don't know exactly what they naturally look like, but when there were encounters with angels in the Bible, people were usually either fooled into thinking they were normal people or they were absolutely terrified by the glowing figures. And there were no cute fluffy wings to be found anywhere.

So, getting back to God, the answer to you question is that God is pretty much indescribable.

In fact, one of the 10 commandments (the ultimate law from God) was that the people never try to make a image of Him to worship. He probably made that rule because people tend to start worshiping the statue/painting/whatever itself rather than who it was supposed to represent and because nothing they'd create could be even close to accurate. 

Now I get down to the exception to this. As I'd mentioned in a previous post, Christianity teaches that God took on human form in the person of Jesus. And if that's true, then God CAN be physically described by describing what Jesus looked like. Sadly, the Bible doesn't give us a detailed list of 'he was this tall and had this color of eyes, etc.'. In fact, the only real description of Jesus in the Bible comes from a prophecy of Him from the Old Testament that says 'There was nothing about his appearance to make him attractive'. So, we can be pretty sure Jesus wasn't a super-model. Beyond that, we can also have a few pretty good guesses. He was Jewish and lived in Israel, so he probably had dark hair, dark eyes, and bronze-ish skin tones. He was a carpenter by trade, so was also likely in good physical shape since that was a labor-intensive job. So all the lovely paintings of Jesus out there? Usually of him being blue-eyed and very pale skinned? Complete baloney.

But, as long as you realize that our mental pictures of God and Jesus are wrong, it doesn't hurt much to have some sort of vague image in mind when you think of Him.

The Bible reading assignment today is to read Ezekiel 1. Normally I won't assign two different passages to look up, but since there is a second really good one, I'm going to also add to this and have you look up Revelation 1:9-18. When you read this, expect to have a whole lot of trouble trying to visualize what Ezekiel is trying to describe. Most of the chapter deals with some sort of creature/angel/spiritual being and only at the end do we get something about God, but the point is that when you read this, it is confusing and you get the impression that the writer was really having a hard time trying to tell us what he saw. There are a lot of 'it was like' phrases because he probably couldn't find the right words for it. In the end, you sort of conclude that it is nearly impossible to describe what they actually saw!